Nightmare Alley - William Lindsay Gresham

Category: Adults, Classic, Crime, Thriller
Language: English
Keywords: Noir

Written by William Lindsay Gresham
Read by Peter Berkrot
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 320 Kbps
Unabridged

One of the 20th-century’s most darkly beautiful works of crime fiction - a story of carny life, spiritualism, and a con man of merciless resolve.

Nightmare Alley begins with an extraordinary description of a freak-show geek - an abject alcoholic and the object of the voyeuristic crowd’s gleeful disgust and derision - going about his work at a county fair. Young Stan Carlisle is working as a carny, and he wonders how a man could fall so low. There’s no way in hell, he vows, that anything like that will ever happen to him.

And since Stan is clever and ambitious, and not without a useful streak of ruthlessness, soon enough he’s going places. Onstage he plays the mentalist with a cute bimbo (before long, his harried wife), then he graduates to full-blown spiritualist, catering to the needs of the rich and gullible in their well-upholstered homes. It looks like the world is Stan’s for the taking. At least for now.